Green Party Refugee Policy – moral, visionary and 100% unrealistic

Green Party have released their new Refugee Policy which is aspirational and righteous but utterly unrealistic.

I believe we desperately need to lift our refugee numbers. We should be ashamed at the way we have done so little to help human beings from the worst areas of the planet, and I certainly believe that the Greens are right to start including climate refugees from the Pacific as a specific target within those refugee numbers, but the problem for the Greens on this policy is two fold – the cost and the fact we can’t even properly house NZ citizens who are homeless and sleeping in cars right now.

The Greens intend to build a new refugee settlement centre and offset the cost of increased refugee numbers by putting a 10% levy on new rich migrants moving to NZ.

That would raise $67.5 million a year. Problem is the full cost of 4000 refugees would be $350million each year.

The Greens are almost $300million out.

That’s a shit load of money we need to make up when you consider we have 41 000 homeless NZers. How is this going to look when NZers see their own citizens on the streets juxtaposed with new refugee centres?

Where else could that $300 million each year go? It would only cost $100 million each year to feed every poor kid in every school throughout NZ and the remaining $200million could go some way to solving our own homelessness problems.

To spend $300 million annually to house refugees when our own poor are in such poverty is a huge political gamble.

This would be a problematic policy to implement in such a short time because of the enormous housing pressures we have right now on our own domestic population.

This Policy will work wonders for the Green base, and also might appeal to new migrants, but expect political opponents to use it to club the Greens with repeatedly throughout the election. You might find that it will be the Greens political  opponents who use it more than the Greens themselves.